Tuesday, October 5, 2010

The most...and least...popular Senators of 2010

We're going to have New York Senate numbers out tomorrow but here's a little preview: we've polled approval ratings for 60 Senators so far in 2010 and Chuck Schumer comes out tops in the country. 57% of voters in the state are happy with the job he's doing.

After Schumer the best approval ratings in our polling for this year belong to Barbara Mikulski at 54%, David Vitter at 53%, and Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, and Jeff Bingaman at 50%. The Murkowski and Snowe numbers suggest it's good to be a moderate Republican for overall popularity, just not if you want to win one of your party's primaries.

On the other end of the spectrum? Carte Goodwin, George LeMieux, and Roland Burris have the worst approval ratings but that doesn't really seem fair since they were all appointed Senators. The elected Senators with the lowest numbers are George Voinovich at 22%, and Arlen Specter and Blanche Lincoln at 27%. Not a coincidence none of those folks will be back for the next Congress and it's just too bad for Democrats Voinovich didn't run again (although he may have had primary issues if he had just like Specter and Lincoln did.)

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I had a question on your HI-02 poll that I wasn't sure where to post:

Polling in Hawaii (especially robo-polling) is quite difficult since it's an insular group and many people (particularly Asian-American women who lean strongly Democrat) will hang up or claim that they're undecided when they aren't. Hence results like the last-minute Cheney campaign trip to Hawaii in 2004 (Kerry won +10), and the weird polling in the special election (every single one had Hanabusa running quite a bit behind Case, when she ended up finishing a fairly strong second.) Did you try to account for this effect in any way? (I admit it would be pretty hard to think of a way to do so, however.)

I have a question on these polls too: I love to look at the raw data, but it's very hard to digest if you have only the question numbers, but not the questionnaire, as Kos didn't release it, at least not in an easily found place.

So.. could you put up your usual PDF's somewhere for these polls if you have them, with question order? I'm looking at HI-01, LA-02 and NM-GOv and NM-01, and NM-02. (DailyKos somehow took down the NM-03 poll, no idea why, but the link is dead.)

A lot of my media sources in home-state of NY picked up this Schumer stuff, what they don't point out and what you don't sufficiently pronounce, is that it's only from the competitive states that you polled.

You'll see tomorrow. Suffice to say he's not Mr. Congeniality, but he's not quite at the bottom.

"A lot of my media sources in home-state of NY picked up this Schumer stuff, what they don't point out and what you don't sufficiently pronounce, is that it's only from the competitive states that you polled."

It's pretty clear we said that it's of the 60 senators we've polled. Obviously 40 are left out.

"NC-8: SUSA for Civitas has Johnson up 5 on Kissell among LVs, Kissell up 1 among RVs, you once said that you'll poll competitive NC races, will you?"